ЖЫ – Huylowave

Recommendation: ☀☁☁

Huylowave is part of a sub-subgenre1 of vaporwave called “Ruskevapor,” a highly specific movement that seeks to highlight economic, social, and political issues of the former USSR states through Slavic socialist aesthetic and sampling techniques of experimental electronic music. Most songs utilize a harsh blend of broken transmission, noise music, glitch, and digital manipulation, to create a sound collage that is typically unpleasant to the ear and is unconcerned with the evocation of nostalgia with which classic-style vaporwave and hypnagogic pop are typically associated. Really, if it weren’t Ruskevapor’s foundation in labels such as Dream Catalogue, TKX Vault, and BLCR Laboratories, it likely would’ve evolved in a manner entirely unrelated to the vaporwave scene.

Huylowave‘s single twenty-minute track is a kaleidoscopic journey through television productions, sonic aberrations, and the Russian equivalent of muzak;2 and it is ЖЫ’s second release for TKX Vault. The first third is sonic screw akin to a mix between Internet Club’s vapornoise works, fuji grid tv, and Employee#6817, with plenty of clear tones and microsamples of advertisements. The second third is much more ambient, even spacey. The final third starts off with a continuous “yeah boy” sample that gradually devolves into more glitchy broken transmission, with the occasional club beat throw in the background, like post-Soviet future funk.

It’s a weird release, and one that all but those most interested in the harshest confluence of noise music and vaporwave will likely find impenetrable. But those who are able to dive into Huylowave‘s jagged depths might find more than enough material with which to engage than its twenty minute run-time may initially belie.